so this has been driving me crazy for about three weeks now. my 7300 will be putting out full power, i'll be mid-qso and then it just... drops. like sometimes it'll go from 100w down to maybe 20-30w and just sit there. SWR looks fine on the meter, dummy load reads the same, antenna hasnt changed. it comes back on its own sometimes after a few minutes or if i cycle the power.

i've already checked the obvious stuff - ALC levels look normal, nothing weird in the menus that i can see. thought maybe it was thermal throttling at first but the fan seems to be running fine and it doesnt feel particularly hot. i did have it on a shelf that maybe wasnt the best for airflow but i moved it and same issue.

anybody seen this before? im wondering if its a PA board issue or maybe something with the ALC feedback loop going wonky. hate to send it in to icom because theyre backed up and its not cheap. just want to narrow it down before i do anything drastic

had almost identical symptoms on mine about a year ago. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the PA board near one of the driver transistors. it would intermittently lose contact and the radio would basically back off power trying to protect itself. you could actually see it with a magnifying glass once you knew where to look, tiny little crack in the solder around the base pin.

now i'm not saying that's definitely your problem but the random nature of it and the fact that cycling power sometimes fixes it temporarily is pretty classic intermittent connection behavior. if you're comfortable opening it up and have a decent eye and a soldering iron, worth poking around. the 7300 service manual is floating around online and its pretty well documented. if not yeah, Icom service is the safe bet but they're slow right now no question

check your DC power cable and connectors before you go digging into the radio itself. i know it sounds dumb but ive chased weird intermittent power drop issues for days and it turned out to be a dodgy anderson powerpole that was arcing just enough under load to cause voltage sag. the radio was fine, my wiring was the problem. worth ruling out the boring stuff first